Apple Says App Store Billings Up 50% In 2014. Total Of $25BN Now Paid To iOS Devs

0

It’s CES, which means Apple has just dropped its annual reminder that plenty of folk won’t care a fig for all those non-iOS consumer electronics that are currently getting manhandled in the Mojave desert.

Cupertino’s CES spirit crusher this year is a missive announcing that the first week of January set a new global record for App Store billings, with customers spending nearly half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases. While New Year’s Day 2015 marked the “single biggest day ever in App Store sales history”.

It also reveals that 2014 was a banner year for its App Store, with billings rising 50 per cent and apps generating more than $10 billion in revenue for developers over the year. How do you like them Apples, CES?

It also revealed it has now paid out a cumulative $25 billion to App Store developers. The last time we heard this stat was in July 2014, when it reported in its earnings call shelling out a cumulative $20 billion to developers — so it’s added some $5 billion in rounded payouts since then. In July Apple said nearly half its developer payout had been paid in the past 12 months.

For a little comparative context, at its developer conference last June, Google said it had paid out $5 billion to Android app developers with wares on its Play Store in the 12 months since its I/O 2013 conference.

Returning to Apple, back in June 2013, at its annual WWDC event, Cupertino had paid out $10 billion to developers, a figure that rose to $13 billion by October 2013 — when the number of apps on its store pushed past the one million mark. At last year’s WWDC Apple said the total number of iOS apps had reached 1.2 million.

Also today Apple was keen to talk up how many jobs its technologies have contributed to the U.S. economy — with a dedicated section on its website laying claim to more than 1.02 million U.S. jobs being created or supported by Apple technologies, some 627,000 of which it attributes to the iOS ecosystem.

Apple also notes that $8 billion of its cumulative payout to iOS app makers has gone to U.S.-based developers.